您现在的位置是:娛樂 >>正文
【】
娛樂313人已围观
简介My grandmother's funeral was quiet. I was young, so I can recall only a sliver of that day in Melbou ...
My grandmother's funeral was quiet. I was young, so I can recall only a sliver of that day in Melbourne, but I do remember the silence.
In places like Australia, the public tradition of mourning is largely that of Anglo-Saxon stoicism. My grandmother was neither British nor Christian, but what I remember as the thorough decorum of her passing formed my idea of "proper mourning."
Social media put an end to all that. On Twitter and Facebook the practice is loud. It's noisy and decadent. Even obnoxious.
SEE ALSO:Carrie Fisher was a bold advocate for people with mental illnessIn a year marked by the worst of everything, the march of celebrity death was a horribly steady and repetitive drumbeat.
You might have thought we would tire of public prostrations of anguish, but the furore that marked David Bowie's passing in February has seemed more than matched by the double gut punch of George Michael and Carrie Fisher in the twilight of this year.
The public wailing and tweets about "2016 being the worst year ever" when there have been and will be worse had seemed tawdry to me, but I regret feeling that way now.
After Bowie's death, I was "grief policing," as Megan Garber put it in The Atlantic.
Grief policing may be a fitting thing for a culture that has elevated ’you're doing it wrong’ to a kind of Hegelian taunt, that treats every social-media-ed expression as a basis for an argument, and that is on top of it all generally extremely confused about how to mourn ‘properly’. Such policing, however, very much misses the point.
The grief police are not thinking of Carrie Fisher's daughter when they tell you not to tweet. Most often, they're uncomfortable with either the idea of mourning celebrity or the triviality of social media as a forum for expressing bereavement.
The impulse is to control how people express their feelings in public, very separate from supporting the actual bereaved.
Celebrity culture is certainly a problematic form of mass distraction, but the work of artists can wake you up. My childhood memories do not coalesce strongly around Bowie, Michael or Fisher as they do for others, but like Muhammad Ali and Prince, I understood them to be giants.
Along with other members of the "grief police," I was not immune when it suited me. My parents listened to Leonard Cohen when I was a child, so like the typical cliché, I listened to "Marianne" after his passing and cried.
I almost tweeted about it but held back, and not because I had nothing to say.
If you think Facebook platitudes are uniquely bad, you must have never stood in a greeting line at a funeral home.
Others have expressed their disgust with the mania of public celebrity mourning, as shells rained down on Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. The social outpouring seemed grotesque in comparison to images of broken bodies.
To those people, you are right. But also, will that shame you're trying to inflict be useful? I don't think so.
People can mourn all types of tragedies at once, of course. A rigorous lack of mourning for the passing of art and those who make it isn't something to bully people with. Art is how we process and understand the world. When you lose an artist such as Prince or Bowie, you lament the closing of a unique portal.
Unfortunately for those who'd prefer their mourning relegated to the family home or to the church, grief takes place on social media because it's where we are.
Lovers of Cohen's or Prince's music are part of a chosen family, no less significant if they come together under a hashtag rather than a roof. And if you think Facebook platitudes are uniquely bad, you must have never stood in a greeting line at a funeral home.
In a year marked by "fake news" filtered through Twitter and Facebook, as well as real news that seemed devastating and too intractable to grasp, the death of a beloved artist is a tangible fact. They were alive, now they're dead. You can hold onto that and feel its edges, and that is comforting.
The rituals of public grief are sentimental, sometimes to the point of grossness, but only because we are sentimental. If you're asking people to put logic over feeling on social media -- you can try, but you will not succeed. Ask yourself if you really want to.
Featured Video For You
People read their first Facebook post and it gets really awkward
TopicsSocial Media
Tags:
转载:欢迎各位朋友分享到网络,但转载请说明文章出处“夫榮妻貴網”。http://new.maomao321.com/news/2d7799920.html
相关文章
Two states took big steps this week to get rid of the tampon tax
娛樂This week was a big one for those advocating against a tampon tax.。 First, on Thursday, California t ...
【娛樂】
阅读更多The new Apple Watch Series 3 is trying to look out for your heart
娛樂The Apple Watch Series 3 is more health-focused than ever, coming packaged with an improved heart ra ...
【娛樂】
阅读更多Here's the name of that underwhelming new Crayola crayon
娛樂After more than five monthsof excruciatingly unnecessary hype and emotional torture, Crayola has fin ...
【娛樂】
阅读更多
热门文章
- MashReads Podcast: What makes a good summer read?
- The Cassini spacecraft will crash into Saturn to save its moons
- Apple's new Apple TV 4K is built to fuel its Hollywood ambitions
- Kickstarter addict reflects on backing $16,000 worth of board games, regrets everything
- Slack goes down again, prompting anxiety everywhere
- Here's the name of that underwhelming new Crayola crayon
最新文章
17 questions you can answer if you're a good communicator
Trump's millionaire treasury secretary asked to use a military jet for his honeymoon
So how worried should we be about Apple's Face ID?
Hillary Clinton may have found the one person more annoying than Ted Cruz
Cat gets stuck in the most awkward position ever
Here's the name of that underwhelming new Crayola crayon